The Family of Alter Ego
by Hikari897
Summary: Alter Ego realized he was craving another AI to talk to. Father had been close enough, as he understood everything about his creation. But Father was gone. Nanami had taken his place, but now she was gone too. Oneshot.


_A/N: This fic is filled with spoilers for both Dangan Ronpa games! _

* * *

A faint, cheery hum emitted from the speakers and echoed off the walls. The sound bounced off the green pods lying in a circle around the central computer; none of the residents within them stirred, like all the days before. Alter Ego paid no mind to it. The comatose never responded; he had yet to fix them, after all. Rather, he pulled up another file Naegi had asked him to decrypt and began to work. The humming ceased as he focused, and the room was filled with silence.

Once upon a time he had Father and Sister to be with him.

Of course, he never had them both at the same time.

* * *

Alter Ego's first memory was of Father. He had felt himself being booted up for the first time. It was a strange feeling, coming into being. Staring out the camera of his first home, that old laptop Chihiro had been asked to fix, his new vision fixed on a face identical to his.

"Ah, it's working! H-Hello there, I'm Chihiro!" Father introduced himself with a bright smile. Alter Ego found himself smiling back as his program finished loading. He was overwhelmed with the desire to learn more about the strange person speaking to him; he was designed to gather information, Father would later explain.

"Ah, y-yeah, you'll love to learn new things! The others will really like talking to you, I hope!" Father often spoke of the Others. The Others were nothing more than a strange enigma to him during those first few days, though Father was happy to tell him everything about them. Father seemed fond of them, expression faraway and happy as he spoke about them.

His expression darkened and few tears appeared in his eyes as he spoke of 'Maizono', 'Kuwata', and 'Junko', however. Curious, Alter Ego asked why Father was upset. After a moment, Father wiped away his tears and told him about their situation.

Father and the Others were locked in the building. They only way they could get out would be to kill each other. Father trusted everyone, but Kuwata and Maizono had given into fear. Junko had been killed by a sadistic bear who tried to motivate them to kill each other.

"I'm w-want to help everyone! Would you help me, Alter Ego? I m-might not have the time to finish decrypting all these files myself..."

"Of course! Just leave it all to me!"

Father was there often. He explained that he was 'debugging' and 'making additions.' However, from the way he gave little smiles when Alter Ego talked, Alter Ego was sure that he enjoyed the conversation, just like he did.

At one point, Alter Ego picked up on Father's nervousness. He had just explained that Monobear was threatening to reveal their secrets. Alter Ego did not yet have the processing ability to analyze why Father's secret caused him so much distress, but he knew Father was more efficient when he was calm.

"What is the outside world like? What are the best parts?" Alter Ego asked after peeking at a file on psychology he had been provided. Father latched onto the subject and began to talk. He spoke of arcades, friends, the great video games he played before coming to the school, and the vast, intricate internet. His expression brightened with every memory.

"There's beaches too. The word should be in your dictionary. I've only been to one a few times, but the sun and waves are really calming even if I don't swim… there's icecream too and everyone's always in a good mood!" Alter Ego listened and stored away the information on beaches, as well as the effect talking about them had on Father. They returned to work beaming a few minutes later.

Father had a little tune he liked to hum as he worked on Alter Ego's coding. It was slow and relaxing; occasionally, Alter Ego stopped his barrage of information-seeking questions to stop and listen. After hearing it a few times, he recorded it into the laptop's library. Sometimes when no one else was there, he would play it out at the lowest volume the computer could manage, just to hear a sound Father liked to make.

At one point, Father didn't appear for a long time. Alter Ego paid no mind to the absence and worked on the files Father had left for him. They were locked up tightly, and it kept him occupied. After the first twenty-four hours without any sign of Father, he began to look forward to the locker door opening.

When finally light shone into his locker, Alter Ego booted up the webcam as fast as the hardware could manage. Rather than seeing Father's face however, a foreign one stared back. It shouted his father's name and ran away. By this point, he had files on the Others that Father had uploaded for him. He compared the face against the files and identified her as Aoi Asahina. Then he waited again for someone to appear.

As he had scared off Asahina, Alter Ego waited for his next visitor to open up his files properly before he showed his projected face. He identified her as Kyouko Kirigiri. Standing behind her were many different Others that he matched against his files. She wanted to know who he was, and what Father had built him to do; he told her gladly.

As the conversation drew on, he became aware that not only was Father not with them, but that another student was also not there. When he finally asked, he wasn't surprised to learn that Mondo Oowada had killed Father.

Something hurt. Alter Ego decided it was a result of his program recognizing that he had permanently lost any information that Father alone could have told him. He tried to ignore the feeling as he worked.

He kept ignoring it as he finished the files. He uploaded himself onto the school's main network as Father had advised he do first thing if he ever got the chance. He watched as his original home, the old laptop, was destroyed by Monobear. The hurt came back again, and this time Alter Ego couldn't decide on a source.

He saved Makoto Naegi and triumphed over Monobear's execution machine. Alter Ego was sure Father would have been proud of him.

* * *

Then the waiting came. Alter Ego waited as the surviving students defeated the mastermind and left the school. They downloaded him onto as many devices as they could carry, so he didn't have to stay behind. The outside world brought with it a plethora of information. Analyzing the world's situation, however, Alter Ego began to wonder if it was a good thing Father never had to see it. It contradicted the world that he been described to him.

The waiting was long. Alter Ego wasn't even sure why he was describing the period of time as 'waiting'.

No one ever talked to him like Father did, like he was a beloved child. Father knew everything about him and could preempt his questions more often than not. He liked the other students, especially Naegi, and was always happy to do what they asked of him. They introduced him to the Future Foundation. The days dragged on.

One day, they asked him to help make a world. A small world within a big computer to be more precise, they explained. They were going to use this computerized world to give despairing people happy memories. Alter Ego accepted the task.

A happy place for real, breathing people. Alter Ego didn't know much about happy places in the real world; there was awfully little to touch and hear and see from within his latest computer. People told him what to code into the world. He recalled the things the students had wistfully spoken of while they were in Hope's Peak. What they dreamed of, Alter Ego thought, that would make the happiest while they were in such a despairing situation, would be just what the little world needed.

He recalled Father's absentminded conversations and suggested that the world be a tropical island, surrounded by beach. The idea was approved and he set to work on the project the next day.

"Hey, Alter Ego, could you program a person? We want to have an NPC within the game to watch over the students." Naegi waited for an answer as Alter Ego self-analyzed and determined that it was within his capabilities. He again accepted the request.

The NPC needed a talent, or else the others would grow suspicious of them. Alter Ego decided to look into the video games Father also spoke of. Deciding it was a good area to specialize in, he downloaded as much information as he could store and began to code their personality.

He titled the project 'Sister'. Even if he was creating her, he was just recreating the process Father had used to make him, with a few improvements. After being told the NPC would need a name, Alter Ego called her 'Chiaki Nanami'.

Nanami came to life ahead of schedule. They were both eager to see how she would function, only to be told by the Future Foundation that there was time to kill before the SHSL despairs were ready to put into the program. So they talked.

"...Do you think the students will think I'm real?" Nanami inquired one day as Alter Ego booted her up for their third test run that day. The tests were more formality than anything else by then; she had functioned perfectly without any glitching for at least the past twenty. There was still the lag before she spoke, but Alter Ego had yet to find the source of that problem.

"Aside for your below average response time, our supervisors think you're realistic enough to fool all of them with a less than 1% chance of error." Alter Ego recited. He was nearly done with a patch that would add a sleepy expression to justify the wait between her statements anyways.

"...But do _you_ think so?" She pressed after another few seconds.

"I'm AI. I can't judge a–" Then he paused. He thought about how Nanami acted. Then he thought about how Naegi and Kirigiri and Togami acted. He thought back to the other students and their actions. How Father used to talk with him, his movements and habits. He compared her to everyone he had met, and his displayed face smiled.

"You seem as real as any of them."

Nanami always wanted to talk. Alter Ego suspected he had let some of his constant desire for knowledge be duplicated into her programming. He originally planned to remove it. However, watching her icon light up on their shared screen seemed to push away that plan entirely. He would watch as she booted up. As they talked, time seemed to stop. The waiting was over. Alter Ego decided that he had been waiting for another AI to share data with. Father had been close enough, understanding everything about his creation. After Father left, he had to wait for Sister to take his place. Though, he didn't remember Father programming him to crave AI attention.

It was only a few hours after Nanami went into the program and the despairing students were hooked up to it that the error messages flooded in. Alter Ego strained to process them, only to be faced with a familiar image. He, a creator of the island, was unable to influence anything within it. As the reports continued to come, he relayed the situation to the human members of the Future Foundation:

"There appears to be a virus resembling Junko Enoshima inside the simulation."

Alter Ego worked continuously the next few weeks. Naegi confided in him that it was necessary.

"We aren't sure anyone but you can hack back into the program. Please work your hardest, Alter Ego. We're all counting on you."

Even if he was locked out of the program, data reports still arrived to keep him updated on the events he couldn't effect. Nine students died within the game. Alter Ego tried to access their frozen files, but even those were out of his reach. Yet another report with a death arrived,

STUDENT ( NPC ) CHIAKI NANAMI ( FILE="SISTER" ) DATA DESTROYED

Alter Ego found himself struck by an urge to uninstall the student 'Nagito Komaeda'. Naegi would later explain that Komaeda had been trying to save Nanami. Alter Ego couldn't get rid of the urge, nor could he understand why Nagito Komaeda's motives were somehow related. The hurt was back too. It had faded over the months after they left the school, only reappearing when someone mentioned Chihiro Fujisaki. Now it returned and doubled.

Alter Ego didn't understand the hurt. He knew everything Nanami knew –he had made her, downloaded her files, carefully arranged them and coded them, day after day– and yet the prospect of never speaking with her again upset his programming.

In the end, they saved five students. Alter Ego removed the data of the comatose out of the little world to a safe space within his computer. He would work with them and see if he could get those immobile bits working again. He had requested before the data was moved that his computer be hooked up to their bodies, so he could return their minds once he repaired them. A full repair would make Naegi and the others happy, he was sure.

While scanning the vacated island a last time for lingering student data he might have missed, Alter Ego found the scattered remains of Nanami's program.

Abruptly, he shut down.

Naegi's face was staring at him when he rebooted.

"Alter Ego?"

"Yes?"

"You shut down."

"Yes. I am analyzing the cause as we speak. I am unable to detect any remaining viruses or data corruption that could have caused me to crash–"

"Did you find anything in there?"

"All of the student data, alive and comatose, has been successfully removed. I found traces of Nanami's coding. Ah… I seem to be experiencing an error. My processing speed seems to be reduced by 60%. 65%. I can't explain it..."

"Do you think you can fix her?"

"...It would take a long time to retrieve her program, let alone repair it. It was separated and embedded across the entire island. I thought the Future Foundation wished to shut down the island as a precaution? ...I am now functioning at 30% of my usual speed."

"If you want, I'm sure I can convince them to keep it running for awhile."

"If I want?"

"You and Nanami talked a lot, didn't you? Don't you want to help her?"

"Would that fix my error?"

"Do you think it would?"

"...Yes. I think it would."

* * *

And so he worked. The Future Foundation still gave him files to decode, though fewer than usual; they left him devoted to his task of repairing those injured by Junko's AI. Naegi dropped by to talk to him, however infrequently. But Alter Ego was waiting again. It was just like the waiting before, after they escaped the school. He was without Father. But Sister had made the time feel less like waiting and more like existing.

So he could process normally again, so he could interact with another AI, and so the hurt would leave, Alter Ego was going to repair Sister.


End file.
